


If I make my bed in hell

by lilith_morgana



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-17
Updated: 2005-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 08:32:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8883964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: Lilah doesn’t believe in love, only possessions. Wesley happens to belong to her.  Post-series hell-fic.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm salvaging some old fics from various places -- this was written for a Buffy secret Santa exchange back in 2005. Oh dear. I rather like it even if I can't even begin to remember enough about the actual plot of Angel's fifth season to spot any details I'd like to change. :)

  
  
_ "If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there." _

(Psalm 139:7-12)

 

****  
**Acheron  
** _ (sadness) _

 

In the first bar south of Styx, Wesley slumps down on a chair with his drink – and thinks about Lilah. Certain things don’t change much from life to afterlife; apparently alcohol goes with introspection in all dimensions. Possibly it’s Lilah who’s the crucial detail in the pattern. If someone were to ask him about it, her memory would be framed by the clatter of glasses, a melody of muffled voices as well as his own increasingly blurry world-view. Not very romantic, as Fred points out. 

Not always necessary, he shoots back. 

But Fred, of all people, knows Wesley is held up largely by romantic ideals of heroism and good-heartedness (and the enormous portions of subdued rage, self-doubt, cynicism that he still manages to keep hidden from her) so she merely smiles. A Fred-smile, trying to reach out. 

Wesley wishes it didn’t make him defensive didn’t make him blurt out justifications for all the trite things Fred sometimes holds against him. He wishes he didn’t have to love her less for being here in Hell with him, either, even if it is just as a flicker of a ghost. 

Signed the contract just like you, she points out. 

Joined the evil law firm just like you. Whatever you’ve done, I’ve done it too. Just like – - 

(Silly little girl, Lilah mocks in his head. Inferior little Wyndam-Pryce can’t stand ‘like yous’. Doesn’t like to be reminded of himself, our plucky hero.)  
  


Lilah can do an almost spot-on imitation of Fred complete with Fred’s every quirk and vice pinned down to cruel perfection. He never asks why she spends so much time consuming irritation but he lets her. He always lets her. It’s so much easier when he lets her. 

Lilah, in turn, laughs at his taste in women before she rams into him with teeth and that low back-of-her-throat chuckle, finishing whatever discussion they had. 

“Madonna-Whore complex, lover. So last century, don’t you think?”

“Could we go one bloody day without an analysis, Lilah?”

“Oh, but it’s so rewarding,” she says and hustles them both down on the floor, reminding him that yes, indeed, he is feeding her his insecurities like she feeds him alcohol this summer. Lilah circles in the air like a bird of prey, opens her claws to grab hold of something – his father, his failures, his deeply repressed sadism, Angel – and fucks the concept of it almost more than she fucks him, sucking the orgasms down her spine with a satisfied growl. 

There’s something deceptive about gathered facts and hypotheses. When the carefully mapped-out hypothesis has fallen, facts remain: all those things about Lilah. All the things she isn’t (sweet, loving, faithful) and the vast majority of things she is (greedy, selfish, immoral, ruthless, cruel, vulgar), adding up to a conclusion that seems to be for someone else to make. Lilah, unwritten. The way her neck tenses as he thrusts into her, owning her more than he has ever owned anything in his life. Her mouth. Her fingertips tracing his scar. How fucking impossibly close she came in the end, much closer than he thought. Much closer than he realised until it was too late. 

The hypothesis of Lilah – that she’s the bitch queen of hell worthy of a painful everlasting death. 

And the facts of Lilah – that the absence of her draws blood from his lips when he’s drunk on Wolfram & Hart’s carefully bottled wines and his head aches with stress and  _ Fred _ and that moment before his father’s corpse dissolved into metal and wires. Her lips kissing a long-forgotten spot along the inner of his thighs, knocking him out. The little quake in her voice – that she hadn’t know he cared, that it meant something that he tried, that he in all his inane gallantry couldn’t ride out the storm on his white horse. 

He doesn’t just miss  _ her _ , he misses the very hopelessness in her effort to shrug reality away, or swallow it with fifty-year-old whiskey and a dash of lime. He misses, too, the way her gaze refuses to leave his face that last day he sees her and he realises that whatever he may have been made of before, the only thing left now is a horrible foreboding of future longing. For one whole summer Lilah is never further away than a distance of breath, then all is distance and he clings to the illusions he once created – or was fed. 

It’s not Lilah’s fault, Angel tells him from the ruins of the broken Pandora’s box. The terms weren’t hers. 

Only Angel could think that would actually make it better. 

 

*

 

Ironic as it might seem, given how she was there when they drew blood from her wrist and conjured up a jar for her soul’s final rest (and all this during her first week in LA), Lilah didn’t quite expect Hell. Sure, she deserves it better than probably anyone save Angel and the Senior Partners, but that’s not the issue. 

Sure, she can handle it. (She likes to think she can handle anything, still.) But it grates that she’s deployed and pushed around within the countless Wolfram & Hart spheres for afterlife while others – Gavin, the idiot – reportedly is settled on top of one of the divisions of the Hades branch. Thousands of hells under his control, and Lilah sits in bars trying to remember something in her life that can excuse this current situation, make hell worth it, somewhat  _ fair _ . 

By order of a tedious project better left forgotten, Lilah learns about Knox and his questionable work ethics way before it reaches the LA branch. She doesn’t protest when she learns about Illyria - of course she also doesn’t fool herself to think her protest would have meant more than a slight embarrassment, but doesn’t protest all the same. The process of death will be instant, she reassures herself from what she reads. It makes it better. When she’s drunk, yes, she would even say  _ fair _ . 

In the underused back of her mind where she stores her conscience, Wesley laughs at her use of the word ‘fair’.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
**Lethe  
** _ (forgetfulness) _

 

Even when Angel rewrites history, Wesley knows – feels – the essence and facts of Lilah. 

He meets Lilah in a grotty demon bar and knows she will be in his life. What makes him recognise her across the populated room and the noise is the impeccable hair in its impeccable coiffure. It is absurd, but as she sweeps her third drink in twenty minutes, he knows he’ll finish the night by tearing that coiffure to shreds in his bedroom. She buys him a vodka, a couple of shots, more whiskey – and tells him while her scent rubs against his skin that she only believes in scales of grey and that Wolfram & Hart would offer him the world in return of certain services. In his arms, later, as she writhes and moans and temporarily erases the concept of failure, he believes her. 

This memory is Angel’s work and it allows a comfortable quietude compared to the truth, but what they’ll never have, not even with the generous assistance of that contract is a clean slate to soil, a tabula rasa to contain the story of them. Not that it would have been a great one, Wesley thinks as Lilah enters his flat and almost immediately unbuttons her blouse. It’s a suicide pact, a contract with Satan concerning their souls – given she has one left to sell, of course, he can never tell because he really was a useless Watcher – a clichéd tainted immature crude case of waking up in the wrong bed. 

Lilah is every girl and woman he has ever despised and quite a few of those he desired, and she knows it. 

Some days she teases him like those girls he knows from his youth, plays the bedroom bully. You're a good man Wesley. Good, honest, pure, innocent like a newborn. Boo-hoo, all the iniquities done to you by the ignorant people. Yes, I pity you. Is that what you want to hear? Lover. 

Other days she means it: You're a  _ good man _ , Wesley. 

“Everyone's good compared to you, Lilah.” He doesn't look at her during this, looks at the closed blinds or open windows and her voice always startles him with its touch of amusement. 

Yeah. So? 

Damnation to him is a serious matter, remains a serious matter even when he decides that religion is ridiculous. When everything has become too late he thinks that perhaps what she really gives him – or brings out in him - is the coldness required to brush it off as a joke, this hotel room reserved for them in the deepest pits of Hell. Perhaps that’s what he can’t forgive. 

 

*

 

Frustration, Lilah realises, would sum up Hell pretty good. Frustration is a sentiment that has been cut out of her body and shaped to statues in the room, every surface surrounding her. She stands on the same spot every single day, knowing that what’s valuable and precious is far beyond this very spot. And that she can’t move. 

She finishes work in the evenings and tries to find her way back to the apartment she considers her own. It’s not always simple. There is no continuity in Hell, and at the same time everything is exactly the same. You can never be certain you’ll meet the person you just spoke to again or even find the same spot twice, yet nothing ever changes. Sometimes she thinks that trying to figure out the logic of this and make it to work in time every morning is what Hell is all about.

Another thing Hell is all about is lust. Unrequited, painful lust for most things really – a pretty necklace, iced mineral water, listening to the Senior Partners ridicule Lindsay’s work in public, leather boots caressing naked skin underneath, your lover and his languid, thorough way of eating every inch of your cunt until you think you might give up everything else if only he could stay forever. 

Lilah has always taken what she wants. No compromises, no shame, no patience. Here her lust is whipped up like sandstorms and there is nothing to drink. The heat turning in the pit of her stomach nearly makes her forget – slip away, close her eyes to Wesley’s bedroom mid-July where her mind seems to have opted on living. Close her eyes, too, to the heavy scent of two weeks’ worth of filthy sex. Of too much too drink, too little to eat, of emptied Tai-food boxes thrown around like used underwear, and of vodka-breath and orgasm-flavoured kisses. 

Behind closed curtains and jalousies they spend a good summer almost-talking when they’re not fucking each other beyond speech and coherence. They try everything they ever thought about trying, and when the last bit of energy has been canalised into blowjobs or handjobs they watch old movies. She mentions that  _ The Italian Job _ is her favourite, so he rents a DVD-box and almost lets it slip that his father banned television in the Wyndam-Pryce household. She almost replies that his father seems like a genuine piece of shit before they both remember who they are and what they’re doing. He gets out of bed with a jerk, walks up to the kitchenette and puts tea or coffee on. He never makes a cup for her, his lack of manners entirely reserved for their little moments out of reality. 

She smiles to herself, thinks it makes her know him better than the others.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


**Styx  
** _ (hate) _

 

It’s not until Angel’s mind-shift falls that he realises how much Lilah must have cared, after all. What she puts up with, what he puts in her hands and she twists into something more constructive than self-hatred. 

You betrayed us, Fred says and walks away. 

My Judas, Lilah says and coaxes him into a state of rage.

Her Judas, her slowly burning sinner at the core of Hell, her faded star in a sky without gods and heroes where both Atlas and Angel have given up on him a long time ago. 

He fucks her with the desperate lack of control that would drive him insane if he was inclined to madness. He isn't, though, he seems far from it and grieves this deficiency - the only one in his ever-growing collection - like he grieves Angel and the blood on his hands and how he always  _ always _ ruins what little he once might have deserved and Lilah never mentions the tears in his eyes. Doesn’t comfort him either, for which he is entirely grateful. Traces of humanity in her and he wouldn't be able to do what he continues to do for three months - fucking, hating, scratching, ejaculating, screaming his self-destruct into her. With anyone else (Fred, his Galatea, yes he is aware) it would verge on rape. With Lilah it becomes give-and-take casual Friday night sex and he both despises and nearly loves her for it. 

No harm done, lover, Lilah says in his head, almost every time and he wishes he believed her. 

 

*

 

"LA will be ready to fall into the apocalypse any day now,” they say down here where Lilah works. “Angel stands no chance."

"What’s the current status of Wyndam-Pryce?"

"Unstable."

Lilah adds sugar in her boss’s coffee and listens, using the cheap method that has provided her with what little she knows these days. Yesterday she made sure his contract was intact. Today is just waiting. That means today is worse than the symbolic purgatory the Senior Partners greet their newly arrived sinners with, because waiting in all forms and shapes is Hell. Someone used to tell her - during her first weeks in LA when she was young and unsuited for murder and expressed doubt - about general Tojo. Rumour had it that he, while the war raged at its worst, forced his closest men to stay up all night playing cards with him. Trivial occupations to block the blows, sit through the in-betweens. 

Hours later Lilah counts the bottles behind the headless bartender, waiting for the Dutch courage to set in. Around her a surge of Hell’s chinking nightlife and she stares down at her hands, the manicure from last week (month? day?) still perfect because Lilah has always been the kind of woman who takes time off the Apocalypse to pop into the beauty salon, no news there. 

There’s no promise of change in hell. 

After the second (fourth? first?) drink she’s accompanied by a vaguely familiar man – Alexander Bellman, a British associate apparently – who drowns in his own Gucci and smells of cologne. They speak of unimportant matters, he moves closer and she thinks, as he leaves her apartment the morning after, that they might as well have played cards. 

"Personally I think it’s sweet that you gave into softness in the end," Gavin comments before he is slaughtered by the Beast. "Who knew you could?"

Lilah doesn’t recall what she said in response. Possibly nothing. 

 

"There’s nothing lovable about you," Wesley says and pushes her down on the bed.

"Tell me, Lilah, what you will do in ten years time? Twenty? When all the surgery and chemicals in the world can’t stop you from aging, what is there left for you to sell out?" Wesley asks in one of the many ways he has of calling her a prostitute. 

_ Fuck you _ , she thinks but she’s too feverish, too burning and sedated with the way his voice deepens and his cock bulges into her hand to push him away. 

"Why do you play this game?" Wesley asks when he has calmed down and they undo themselves from one another. "Why did you come to Wolfram & Hart?"

At times, when she breathes his warm newly-fucked skin and feels his fingers in her hair she wants to tell him something, everything – just words to stop departure.  _ Let’s bugger this all to hell. Come away with me. We could have the world, lover. Brains and money and this, this exhilarating depraved moment outside all time and context _ . Of course she doesn’t say it; he would have laughed if she did but it’s the thought that counts and whatnot. 

It takes two months, a heat wave and a plethora of particularly unpleasant clients for her to realise exactly how dangerous the game, their play is. Wesley doesn’t know it, but there are so many things to love in him. Such varieties of things that she could and does love, with the strength of thousand unlovable bitch queens from Hell. Wesley wouldn’t admit it, but Lilah’s kind knows a lot about human nature. She gets up at five in the mornings and works a pathetic amount of overtime. She sees enough people in one week to be disgusted with mankind and she knows for a fact how few decent, honest people there really are. 

Wesley in all his cruel misery is the only good man she’s ever known. 

In hell where the leitmotif is high-pitched agony to the tune of regret she understands better the depth and consequences of what happened when she began loving him. Understands as she catches a glimpse of the plans for LA, the files regarding the afterlife fates of the doomed ones, as she snatches the ones she’ll need and edits them in secrecy. 

Understands, as she knows he will never love her back.  
  
  


* * *

  
**  
**  
Cocytus  
_ (lamentation) _

 

The flat he possesses or likes to think he possesses here in hell is haunted by Fred’s whispers in the walls, around his bed, over the kitchen table when he makes the kind of breakfast she would have approved of when they were alive – pancakes and orange juice and coffee. He doesn’t eat it but it gives him something to do, making it. 

“Do you think it’s Angel’s fault we’re here?” she asks sometimes, curling up with her legs under her on the chair opposite him. “In hell?”

No. Yes. Possibly both or neither. No, he doesn’t blame Angel, stopped blaming Angel before he even begun. Fred grasps this definition of loyalty but Fred never understood to what desperate extent Wesley would have followed Angel, would have bowed down to him in the darkest deepest valleys of whatever immorality the W&H set them up to despite their intentions. He would have made a scene, protested, but followed all the same. In one way or the other. 

This is the self preservation society, Lilah smiles in his head. A Lilah-smile, unattainable and teasing. 

In the end, this is what it’s all about.   
  
  
  
\---

Lilah smiles and reaches over to kiss him goodbye after he has untied every knot inside his stomach and lies breathless on the sheets. The feeling rocks there above his head, slowly, surrounded by a sudden silence as if it was afraid. As if it’s waiting for a push, an awakening. Lilah nudges it sometimes with words and motions, that peculiar glance as she talks about trust and betrayal or as he finally breaks up; or cool fingertips on his chest. 

It will wake up, this feeling. That he is sure of. Apart from this he knows - when he’s frank with himself - nothing about love and everything about hate and it wears out your personality after a while. 

I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, he tells her every night when her head thumps down on his grey carpet. 

I wouldn’t have let you anyway, she retorts, always a note of boredom in her voice. For God’s sake, I’m a grown woman. I save myself. Or fail to save myself. Get  _ over _ it, Wes. 

  
  
\---  
  
The flat he possesses or likes to think he possesses here in hell is haunted by light, as well. Destructive light breaking in through the enormous windows he can’t escape. 

He grows up in a house where nothing is allowed to be hidden and everything is. Nothing is allowed to be a secret, nothing within the manically dusted rooms are slipping underneath sofas or shivering in the cupboards because Roger Wyndam-Pryce has a policy of truth – no, Wesley, show me your hands or go back up to the attic – and open doors. 

Here he sits in his sofa, watching himself in the window glass, hour after hour. It’s not like there’s a lot of need for heroic rogue demon hunters in hell. Details from the earlier life step out of the shadows inside him as he watches them surface in the windows: the loathed father ( _ I should have killed you _ ), a scrawny little boy who doesn’t go out to the other children, the infamous Watcher’s Council Survey letter telling him he’s insufficient for further employment – all of it adding up to a whole lifetime of obsessive desire for things he no longer can name. 

“It most certainly isn’t correct, Wesley,” his father snaps across the room. “If you cannot tell the difference between present indicative and present subjunctive, I see no point in teaching you at all. Now, one more time –  _ paream _ ,  _ pareamus  _ \--” 

“I was only five, you bastard.”

Fred’s ghost vanishes with a little gasp when he picks up his gun and kills his father again and again and again, until the body has dissolved on the floor. Every day he kills his father and every day he grieves the infertile bullets they’ve given him. He learns and relearns all the demons’ names in their mother tongues all the Latin tenses but nothing matters because he can’t get the last two right anyway and bullets are  _ useless. _

This is the self-preservation society, Lilah comforts in his head. 

He finds no rest and no comfort and his head is swarming with sounds only skin could hush up but everyone he has ever known seem to have taken the shapes of ghosts. In his head, Lilah puts her hands over his chest and orders his soul or heart or whatever it is that keeps making the bloody noise to shut up. Even a soul gives up and curtsies in front of someone like her, with all the power. 

 

*

 

Our love is written on our bodies, Darla mutters over a cup of tea in the basement of W&H one day when Lilah has grown tired of waiting and must occupy her flittering hands, her head. Darla waits, too, without admitting it. 

How very precious, Lilah mutters back. She doesn’t believe in love, only ownership, and if she could create contracts for hearts down here where resources all belong to someone else and her job is to serve coffee and curtsey sweetly, she would. 

Her own body is a palimpsest and written on its original layer long before the capital-roared WESLEY, YOU BASTARD is: you belong to me. 

MINE. It’s indelible. 

Her epistulae heroidum is brief, almost non-existent. To Odysseus with longing, to Eneas with agony and to Wesley with furious salt-tasting frustration verging on hate. 

Wesley,

Fuck you. I love you.  _ Fuck _ you. 

Lilah. 

 

* * *

  
  
  
**Phlegethon  
** _ (fire) _

  
  
The surface of his Bloody Mary is too watery and he’s on his way back to the bartender to complain when Lilah walks in. He sits down, waives. In a trice she’s found him there, sitting in the back of the place with an ashtray and a pack of overpriced fags keeping him company. 

“Wesley.”

She looks like when he last abandoned her, swaggering her properly dressed way through the eternal tormenting flames of hell, of course. Anything else would be a surprise. Except for that flickering motion in her eyes; flip-flop, flip-flop, like a car blinker or a bird taking flight – a puff of fear, serious fear and not simply vanity, echoing across the crowded room. The world is hardened down here – sharpened like diamonds. In the fury, all the sad human fates ascending from the pits of throngs and swarms, and oh, all those things you get to know when human dignity is cleansed off like shells. 

Such as: Lilah doesn’t lie. Not now. Or not to him, he can’t tell. Such as: Lilah hasn’t slept one night since she came here. Her eyes are wide open and pale. 

“You wanted to see me?” 

“I have a few files you might want.” She sits down. Her neck is uncovered and the scar visible, spelled out in red ink. 

She tells him about Wolfram & Hart in Hell, what he should know, what he already knows, what Lilah herself barely knows but assumes. Something about a new time approaching, a résistance forming itself, other various war-terms as wildly inappropriate for this ceasefire as anything else. 

“Your fate for Fred’s,” is what she finishes with, is what it all comes down to. 

“She’s not supposed to be here.”

“Well…”

“She’s  _ not _ supposed to be here.”

Lilah grins, only a little shiver betraying the cool mockery. “Okay. Well, save her then. It’s all in the file.” 

He’s quiet for some time, watching his glass being refilled. “You’re offering to help me? Is that it? What’s in this for you then? Prestige? Twenty virgins and a Jaguar at the gates of Heaven?”

“A double Midleton,” she tells the bartender and shifts in her seat. Her body beside him has a different movement here, among the smoke and the light, still shying on the doorstep. He thinks he might be slipping into madness after all because nothing in his mind makes much sense –  _ shying on the doorstep? _ “I’m sorry to break the news to you, lover, but Hell isn’t exactly an extension of life. Rules change. Something tells me it’s the purpose of it – making us suffer, feel frustrated, you know – atone for sins or, in our cases, abilities to piss the Senior Partners off.”

“I’ll take it,” he says. Before she complicates anything he’ll take it and have it done.

“Of course you will,” she says quietly. “But I suggest you take the files and read them. I’ve highlighted anything you’d need to pay attention to so -“

“What’s in it for you?” he asks later and presses her against the dirty-grey bathroom wall. The tiles are cool and bear a stench of urine, sticks to her hair like plaster. 

“Already told you.”

He twirls two fingers inside her. “No.”

“Yes.” 

Lilah has closed her eyes to every murderer and rapist and child-molester and demon trash she let walk free when she was alive, turned the other cheek, swallowed a double vodka and moved on. She’s helped legalise unmentionable crimes but Wesley’s nails in the flesh of her shoulder, digging into the skin on her back stream into her in a previously unknown way. Always did, still do. 

His world, the one with all the heroes and decency becomes too real and she pushes back against the wall to escape. 

She tells him as they fuck, tells him about this eternity without everything she misses and how she gets through it, tells him to shut up, get over it and  _ I need you here _ . The deep, dark taste of his cock finally at the back of her tongue and she holds back the use of teeth as he grabs her hair in his hands and pushes her closer. He doesn’t kiss her when they’re done and she never expected it. 

“Here,” he says and hands her the signed contracts. It must be far past midnight, she should be going home but in the sordid routine of searching for missing clothes in a dirty men’s room she’s struck by the final realisation: everything has already happened here, circles are the only patterns and he won’t leave again. 

Hours later when they finally find her place and he finally makes her shout every little crude thing she’s bottled up since last forever, he closes his eyes beside her and Lilah gets up to place her contract in a sealed jar, far from his hands and her conscience. 

Just before dawn as Wesley begins to snore she falls asleep as well, for a change.


End file.
